OPINION: Hartlepool. The Only town where local's accept the system of Council Tax is broken, yet refuse to stand up & fix it !

20 odd years ago, volunteers going out doing litter-picking would have sparked the militant unions into a striking frenzy.

Now, its the day to day reality of living in Broken Hartlepool with a clearly 'broken' Local Council.

22nd Sep 2025

Hartlepool’s public services are literally in tatters. Council chiefs are pocketing salaries larger than the Prime Minister’s, yet ordinary residents are left unable to access even the most basic services. The town’s tip is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, council officials are near-impossible to hold to account, and the list of failings grows longer by the week.

Ask anyone in Hartlepool, and they’ll tell you just how broken things have become.

So much so, It’s now fallen to local residents themselves to form litter-picking squads just to keep the streets halfway respectable. Twenty years ago, militant unions would have been up in arms at the thought of unpaid locals “taking jobs” from council workers, warning of families being starved and strikes being called. Today, no one bats an eyelid—it’s seen as normal.

Fast forward to 2025, & it seems Hartlepool Borough Council’s pyramid-scheme style of governance has numbed the public into almost total apathy. Many locals simply shrug, & mutter “what can we do about it?” and then retreat to the pub or the PlayStation. This tragedy is the prime example of just how easily people have come to accept neglect as if it were inevitable.

And whilst locals seemingly accept this managed decline, Hartlepool’s Chief Executive Denise (The Fleece) McGuckin quietly collects her wage and pension package higher than the Prime Minister’s—with local residents seeing little to no return on that investment.

Council tax goes up, services go down.

That’s the only consistent trend.

Money is endlessly being poured into the black hole of Church Street—“regenerated” more times than Madonna, Katie Price. Meanwhile, councillors are now donning high-vis jackets and picking up litter bags & dog sh!te, as though this is the new benchmark of civic pride.

Let’s be clear: street cleaning is a service residents already pay for in their council tax. The council should be doing its job, not outsourcing it to unpaid volunteers.

And here’s the real question: every time volunteers pick up a litter bag, how many council jobs are they actually replacing? How many people could the council be employing—giving them an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work—if it wasn’t so intent on pushing responsibility back onto the taxpayer, who are paying their Council Tax & receiving the square root of zero back in return ?

Instead of tolerating this slow-motion collapse, residents should be demanding accountability. Because on this level of service, Hartlepool Borough Council doesn’t deserve reform—it deserves abolition.